Press Release

Srijon Chowdhury’s second solo exhibition at Upfor, The Coldest Night, includes new oil paintings occupying the limen between fairytale and realism. Chowdhury often uses intense color and value contrasts as immersive tools, and treats paintings as semi-architectural objects, moving them away from walls to define new spaces within spaces.

This technique forms an intimate viewing space for Revelation Theater, a series of monumental works currently on view at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (through March 4, 2018). For his 2016 exhibition at Upfor, Memory Theater, Chowdhury transformed the gallery with colored lighting, sound and a series of scrims, around which he nestled live plants and small works by over a dozen fellow artists. Works in The Coldest Night, rather than redirecting Upfor’s space, instead reference architectural elements in the gallery to direct the viewer’s eye.

Srijon Chowdhury (b. 1987 in Bangladesh) received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design (2013). Intended to act in the space between knowledge and emotion, his dream-like oil paintings consider the present moment as part of a larger, intuited (perhaps mythic) history. He has exhibited in Los Angeles at Klowden Mann, The Torrance Art Museum, Jaus, Launch Gallery and Helen Bolsky Gallery; in Philadelphia at Vox Populi, in Chicago at Sector 2337, in Miami at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, and at The Gallery in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Chowdhury divides his time between Los Angeles, CA and Portland, OR, where he runs an alternative exhibition space, Chicken Coop Contemporary. The space was recently awarded a Precipice Fund Grant from the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art for its contribution to the arts community. Chowdhury was recently awarded an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Award.